This is the fourth in a series of posts discussing the implementation of the 4dashes productivity tool. Continuing from the last post, it covers the user interface implementation using Angular.js. The post assumes the reader has a basic understanding of the Angular framework.

This is the third in a series of posts discussing the implementation of the 4dashes productivity tool. It covers the web services communication and implementation of business logic within the Angular-based web application. The post assumes the reader has a basic understanding of the Angular framework.

This is the second in a series of posts discussing the implementation of the 4dashes productivity tool. It covers the server-side API implementation for HTTP web services built on Node.js and Express. It is an in-depth continuation of the devops discussion for deploying a load-balanced configuration.

This is the first in a series of posts discussing the implementation of the 4dashes productivity tool. It covers the project structure and build system supporting a rapid developer workflow and creation of production assets. It is a continuation on the groundwork discussed here representing the state of the product at launch.

This post discusses my challenge to work smarter, not longer, and the path that led me to build 4dashes — a productivity tool inspired by the Pomodoro Technique.

For those who followed my posts during the beginning of my startup, I have launched a preview of the product.

With an operational approach for managing my environment established, I shifted my attention toward drafting product scope over the past few weeks. This post outlines the core product features and acceptance criteria that will be referenced during the upcoming design and development activities.

What if I could use Vagrant to configure and create reproducible environments for development, test, and production? This is the question I thought to myself while working on the planned activity to setup a MongoDb cluster. After spending time testing the cluster with VirtualBox and Vagrant and then switching to knife-solo to bootstrap droplets on Digital Ocean, I opted to dig further into my question.

With an excellent foundation in place to automate provisioning of secure servers with Chef, I spent week two establishing an application project structure using the Node.js platform. Additionally, I setup a load balancer configuration with HAProxy and tested it using a local multi-machine Vagrant environment. Read on to find out details about this setup.

With the startup plan in place, I spent the first week focusing on provisioning servers with a cloud provider. Specifically, I intended to leverage a solution such as Puppet or Chef to automate the setup and configuration of a server within the Digital Ocean cloud hosting service following a few security best practices. Before starting each week’s objective, I will be clarifying the business value and exit criteria to help keep the end in mind.